


all peeling thunder

by GryfoTheGreat



Category: Bleach
Genre: Family Issues, Gen, Karakura Town, Protective Older Brothers, Swing Set, during time skip, ichigo: NOPE LET'S MAKE THIS ABOUT ME AND MY ISSUES, me: i want to write about hitsugaya teaching karin shinigami stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-05
Updated: 2016-05-05
Packaged: 2018-06-06 15:38:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6759817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GryfoTheGreat/pseuds/GryfoTheGreat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's supposed to cope, isn't he? Isn't that what big brothers do?</p>
            </blockquote>





	all peeling thunder

**Author's Note:**

> HEY BLEACH FANDOM IT'S BEEN SIX YEARS I'M BACK  
> I have no idea what is even going on in canon at this point??? I'm just making stuff up as I go along

The summer Karin and Yuzu turned eight, their father declared that they were going on a family holiday. With Ichigo having started junior high with an eye to getting into med school, they wouldn’t have the time for it in future years.

Karin didn’t particularly care. She was obsessed with swimming at the time, and simply wanted a pool, a diving board, and possibly an inflatable ring. She got all three. The complex was vaguely run down and the water wasn’t exactly clean, but she and Yuzu dove and swam all day long, Ichigo occasionally deigning to join them, afraid to besmirch his exalted status as a high schooler.

She remembers being happy. Opening her eyes underwater and seeing Yuzu hair’s flowing in the water. Dad embarrassing the family in a series of increasing flamboyant Hawai’ian shirts. Ichigo getting haunted by a little girl ghost in a frilly swimsuit.

(Yeah. Her family was totally normal.)

But one day – one of their last ones – Karin was in the pool alone. Yuzu had wanted ice-cream, and Dad took her to get some. Ichigo was in the far corner in the shade of a palm tree, reading one of his silly Greek fantasy books. Karin was floating lazily in the water, her ring spinning her in careful, slow circles. Some older boys – well, older than her, at least – were running around the edge of the pool. She tired eventually, though. The sun was beginning to set, and the water was getting cold. She swam over to the edge of the pool, and tried to push her ring up onto the concrete.

Tried, being the key word. The boys had gotten bored of running, and had decided to pick on the little girl with the blue shark ring. They pushed her off, and back into the water. Not one to be deterred by some snot nosed boys, Karin tried again. This time they shoved her back viciously, making the plastic edges of the tube catch her painfully in the stomach. They laughed at the tears in her eyes.

She decided to try one final time, but before she could even orient her ring, her brother was storming over, book abandoned. The orange hair, the fearsome scowl, and the inches and pounds he had on them made them step back in fear. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” He strides towards one of them, making as if to shove him into the water. “Get out of here!” The boys decided that enough was enough, and fled. “Idiots. Here, Karin.” He takes her ring, and pulls her up out of the water, heedless of the fact that she’s sopping wet. “They didn’t hurt you, did they?”

“Only a little. Ichi-nii, that was so cool!” For once, her dorky older brother is living up to his garish hair.

“Ha. Well, I’m your older brother. Isn’t it my job to protect you?” He hauls the tube up over his shoulder. “Come on, let’s get you dried and dressed. Yuzu and Dad will be back with the ice-cream. Can I have yours for saving you?”

“Not a chance.”

 

Years later, she will remember this. Dad is slumped on the floor. Yuzu is screaming in the distance. Ichigo is bound on the floor, yelling her name desperately. There is a black blur behind him.

And then she forgets.

(In her mind, she forgets. But her soul remembers her brave big brother, how he fought for her, how he loved her.)

 

She is not there when he wakes up, but she is there after.

She doesn’t expect him to behave normally. Things happened. Big things, life-changing things; she doesn’t know the details, exactly, but the signs are there if you know to look for them. A cold street corner where a god took their last breath; a scorch mark on a tree planter; a piece of black fabric waving from a telephone pole.

She expects recovery. This is her older brother, the boy who kept going, who picked up the pieces after their mother died. He helped Karin with her homework in the most aggravating way possible. He bought Yuzu flower seeds to plant in their garden. He kept track of the stock in the clinic so their father wouldn’t run out of anything.

He doesn’t recover. He stays still, static, even as the months go by and the scars fade. The pieces of his old life are still scattered around him, still drawing blood. Karin doesn’t get it. He has his life back. No more wars to fight, no more injury; just his friends and his family and his high school. Shouldn’t he be moving on?

He isn’t. His smile, infrequent before, is rarer than ever; the one he dredges up is a plastic imitation, dropped as soon as Orihime or Keigo’s attention is redirected. He doesn’t even scowl, just looks, blankly, until something reminds him; until Yuzu wears a dress Rukia stole, until Mizuiro inquires politely after the ‘chick with the ten-ton rack’, until they walk by Urahara’s and no-one yells a greeting as they pass.

(She sees it. He hides it, but she sees it; a flicker of pain, deep and festering, from the tight set of his jaw to the desperate clench of his hand.)

                                                                                                                                                                         

The shinigami stay away, initially. Karin only glimpses them once in a blue moon; the slap of waraji on concrete, the grate of a Hollow’s death cry across her soul, the flare of unfamiliar reiatsu lancing through her mind.

Until it isn’t unfamiliar anymore.

It’s one of those bright summer days, where the sun is cheerful enough to draw everyone out of their homes, but the pond in the park is iced over. She crouches down, and sees tadpoles glimmering beneath the ice.

“You killed them,” she reprimands.

“Collateral damage.” Hitsugaya crouches down beside her. His hand hovers over the ice; he mutters, and a glow spreads through the ice, slowly melting it until the pond is liquid once more.

He rises with an unnatural, inhuman grace. He’s of a height with her now; more like a middle schooler than a nine-year old. The ever messy hair is shaggier than usual, and his white kosode is fouled with black blood.

“Where’s Afro-san?” she asks, following him as he makes to leave.

He stops, looking back at her with hard eyes. In the dying light of sunset they look bluer than ever. “In a rural town in Nepal, hopefully staying out of trouble.”                              

“Huh.” Karin sits down on the swing. “Why on earth did they send a big shot like you to this dead end?”

Hitsugaya leans against the swing’s frame. “Karakura was the site of one of the most destructive battles in shinigami history. Powerful Hollows are always attracted to battlefields. This one is no different. They’re rotating in Vice Captain-class shinigami and above as often as they can to clean up.” He pushes the swing experimentally. “Why is this seat hanging?”

She pushes off with her feet, swinging gently. “You swing on it. Try it out.”

He stares at her, unimpressed.

She scowls back.

He sits.

“You learned that look from your brother,” he complains, pushing back slowly, as if he expects to fall.

“The one and only patented Strawberry Scowl.” They’re swinging out of phase, destructive waves. “Not that he does much of that, anymore.”

“Anymore?”

She pauses. “You’ve been watching him.”                                                                                      

“Yes.”

“He isn’t adjusting.”

A hesitation, then; “Yes.” Hitsugaya is as blunt as ever.

“Why aren’t you helping?”

“We’re trying,” he says, quietly. “We think we might have found a way to restore his powers.”

“It isn’t his powers he misses.” Okay, that’s a lie, and Hitsugaya knows it, going by the look he gives her. “Like, not the most. He needs his friends.”

A long silence. Traffic rushes nearby. The swings creak. Her sneakers scrape noisily against the tarmac.

“Couldn’t you – couldn’t you visit? In one of those bodies you had last time? He could see you, and maybe…”

“And it would remind him of all that he has lost.” He brings the swing to a halt, fingers wrapped painfully around the chains. “What do you do when you are wounded, Kurosaki Karin? Do you pick at it constantly until it bleeds, rip the scabs off so that it will leave an ugly scar? Or do you cover it, forget about it, and let it heal cleanly?”

“But…”

“Do you know, nobody saw Kuchiki Rukia outside her division for three months after she returned from this world? Do you know that she has been offered this assignment numerous times and never taken it? Do you know that Abarai Renji trains alone?” His voice is icy. “The pain of parting is never one-sided.”

Karin realises, that, maybe, deep inside, he misses her brother too. Ichigo was never good with authority figures but he gets on well with kids; the role of big brother fits him well. Maybe he took the pint-sized shinigami under his wing. She tries to imagine it; her tactless, informal older brother, teasing Hitsugaya, who is best described four feet and five inches of unadulterated frustration and grumpiness.

Karin shakes her head, and smiles.                                                                                                                  

“I’m sorry for being insensitive.” He raises his head and gapes at her in shock. “What?” she demands.

“I never thought I’d hear a Kurosaki apologise – ow!” He glowers at her, shaking his leg out where she’d kicked it. “That was unnecessary.”

“Shut up, shrimp.” He sputters. “I just… I miss him. Isn’t that stupid?” She snorts, leaning against the chain. It’s cold, probably from the remnants of Hitsugaya’s reiatsu. “He’s right there, right next door, right in front of me, and I miss him more than I ever did when he was off training.”

“It isn’t stupid.” The ice is gone, melted away to leave soft snow.

“How do you know?” She looks up at him. His eyes are – tired. Weary.

“Because I feel the same.” He looks away, up to the clear summer sky. “It – the war – changed people. Some for the better.” A pause. “Some for the worse. But no matter what you do, you can’t – you can’t help them heal. You just have to leave them be. Let them carry the burden on their own.”

She wonders who he’s talking about – because, going by the strange tenderness in his voice, he must be talking about someone. A colleague? A close friend? Maybe, possibly, her brother?

She groans and leans precariously off the back of the swing. “I hate this stuff,” she complains. “I just – I just want to deal with it head-on!”

“Spoken like a true Kurosaki,” Hitsugaya says, almost amused. “You can’t punch all your problems into submission. What are you doing? You’re going to fall off.”

She’s swinging again. “Just copy me. Lean back, and swing until you’re going really fast, and then you - ”

Karin launches off the swing, tumbling through the air, weightless, landing in a skid a couple of meters away. “Come on, shinigami. Outdo me if you can!”

Okay, she expects him to outdo her, _duh_ , he’s technically a soldier, but she does not expect him to soar past her head with a yell and land on a tree on the opposite of the park. “Show off!” She jogs over to help him extricate himself from the innocent tree. He lands with a thump and a curse. She extends a hand, which he ignores.

“Hey, you’ve got leaves in your hair. No – stay still!” She leans over and picks them out one by one. He submits to her ministrations grumpily, complaining under his breath. “There you go. Now the Hollows won’t think you’re a tree!”

He gives her another one of those looks, the one that she thinks he must have honed on his subordinates. “You are entirely too much like your brother for your own good.”

“Karin?” They both jump; Hitsugaya looks exactly like he just got punched in the stomach.

“Did you _summon_ him?” she hisses under her breath before fumbling her phone open and waving it in the air. “Ichi-nii? What are you doing here so late?” Karin runs downhill, carefully avoiding looking at Hitsugaya. He is frozen, eyes fixed on her brother.

“Got kept late helping Inoue with Student Council stuff. What are you doing?” Ichigo is looking down at her in confusion, uniform jacket slung over his shoulder.

“I hung around after soccer practice finished, and then Sugawara called me to ask about the maths homework.” She shows him her phone, still clutched in her hand, and bites her lip. Karin is bad at lying, especially to her brother.

“Huh. Could have sworn…” His eyes scan the park, passing over Hitsugaya. “Whatever. Come on. Yuzu’s making tonkatsu.”

Karin follows him, asking about Student Council. For a second, she feels cold, and then it disappears entirely.

(He’s gone when she looks back.)


End file.
